This election contest seemed to rouse in the indolent young Spanish king the first evidence of determination and skill at political brinksmanship. The extraordinary lengths and great expense to which the candidates went to further their bids, when placed against the fairly limited powers that came with being emperor, makes clear the symbolic power this nominal empire brought with it: if a nation’s cultural riches and the dignity of its language could improve its chances as the next torchbearer of global empire, being crowned by the pope with the iron crown of Charlemagne provided the most important ritual and material confirmation of this inherited role. In the end, the outcome turned on the will of the bankers: both Francis and Charles relied on the Fuggers of Austria to lend them ready cash to bribe the electors, and the Fuggers, feeling a sudden national loyalty to Charles’s German descent, cut off Francis’s credit. The election duly fell to Charles on 28 June.17
Charles’s triumph nevertheless created its own series of problems. After having spent less than two years in his Spanish dominions, he abruptly announced his intention to return to his northern lands for his investiture as king of the Romans and, adding insult to injury, asked the Castilian Cortes (parliament) to bear the enormous expense of both his election and his triumphal progress north, having already blown through the six hundred thousand ducats they gave him in 1518 (and, in a further insult, having spent much of it in the kingdom of Aragon). To make matters worse, he overplayed his hand by insisting the Cortes be summoned to attend his pleasure at distant Santiago de Compostela, and then still farther up the road at the Galician port of La Coruña, from which he was busy preparing a fleet for departure. Charles seemed hardly to notice the level of outrage felt in Spain at this foreign visitor who many doubted would ever return, though his fixation on the north was perhaps understandable, given reports that the runners-up in the imperial election—Francis I and Henry VIII—were preparing an alliance against him. After making the minor concession that he would appoint no further foreigners to positions of power in Castile—and doing so in a convincing performance of the Castilian tongue, which he had been learning—Charles took his subsidy and promptly appointed the dour Dutch cardinal Adrian of Utrecht as regent in his absence, before turning his back on a Spain that was breaking into open revolt even as he set sail for England.
Hernando’s reading in Seville during the autumn of 1519 showed signs of his assiduous preparation to be of use to the emperor-elect as he accompanied Charles on a victory lap through his Burgundian and German lands. After returning to a summary of Roman history he had set aside a few years earlier, Hernando spent the rest of the summer making his way through the thick wad of pamphlets that were bound together with it. We can follow his progress through his characteristic notes that record the dates on which he read each of them. These eighteen works, mostly of a dozen pages or less, had been purchased in Rome in the autumn of 1515 and probably bound together soon afterward, to preserve them from the disintegration that was their usual fate. Hernando’s choice to buy and keep these flimsy pamphlets, at which most collectors would have turned up their noses, would have struck many as odd, and his decision to study them among the thousands of works he now owned may have seemed even stranger. But this miscellaneous haul from the Roman cartolai gave Hernando a sweeping view of global affairs and their historical context, one that anticipated by a century and a half the invention of newspapers, even though it served much the same purpose. Hernando read in these pamphlets of the Portuguese victories in north and east Africa—at Azamor in Mauretania and Kilwa and Mombasa on the Swahili coast—as well as of the taking of Malacca (in modern Indonesia) by the Duke of Albuquerque, who as Admiral of the Indian Ocean was the Portuguese counterpart to the Columbuses. Then there was a series of reports on military ventures in which the French were engaged, from the campaigns of the Italian Wars to the Auld Alliance with Scotland and its punishing defeat at the Battle of Flodden in 1513, and news of a major battle between the Ottoman Sultan Selim I and Shah Ismail, Sofi of Persia, which represented a turning of the Ottoman war machine east, away from its century-long onslaught on the eastern edges of Western Christendom. To the north of this, however, was news of the Hungarian peasants’ revolt in 1514 and a major victory late that year for Polish and Lithuanian forces over the Muscovites at Orsha. Though Hernando’s volume of cheap print—which mostly covers events five years distant and even stretches back to the fifteenth century and also included Roman history and saints’ lives—hardly counts as breaking news in our digital world, it connected him, in a way few other royal counselors could rival, to the chatter of the globe over which Charles sought to rule. This global vision was partial and primitive, but Hernando may have begun to realize his library could be a resource with few parallels, an eye in a kingdom of the blind.18
Yet the momentous political and historical climate in which Hernando would be submerged as he traveled north may not have been the foremost thing on his mind. If his childhood had taught him to look toward Rome as the center of the world, his time in the city would have alerted him to the competing and perhaps superior claims of the north. While Hernando would have been familiar with Flemish architecture from a young age, and Isabella’s collection of paintings by van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden would have given the Spanish court a distinctly Dutch feel, his move to begin collecting printed images put him in a terrain where the north’s dominance was plain. The prints he had collected in Rome, by the likes of Giovanni Battista Palumba and Ugo da Carpi, were mere prentice work when set against the woodcuts and engravings of the Dutch and German masters, Israhel van Meckenem and Lucas Cranach, and of course the uncontested genius of the printed image, Albrecht Dürer. Indeed, according to the great art biographer Vasari, Dürer’s trip to Venice in 1505 was not to learn from the Italians but to secure legal protection against the incessant pirating and plagiarism of his work. Dürer’s dominance in the world of the printed image was rivaled and perhaps even surpassed in the world of printed words by the towering figure of Erasmus: both men had mastered the revolutionary techniques of the Italian Renaissance, in pictorial realism as in classical scholarship, but had added to these a powerful awareness of the possibilities of print itself. Unlike the geniuses Hernando had met in Rome, who playacted the glories of the ancient city in hopes of tricking it back into life, Erasmus and Dürer were cannily attuned not just to what the past had to offer them but also to how the present might be reshaping it. Even as Magellan sailed west with the aim of encircling the world, and Hernando’s team of cosmographers crawled Spain to fix its dimensions, Hernando himself headed north, approaching what some might call the ground zero of modernity: the unprecedented sense that the present might be entirely different from—perhaps in some senses superior to—the past.
This intense excitement at what lay in wait to the north may go some way to explaining Hernando’s actions at the rocky Galician seaport of La Coruña in May 1520, as he waited for the fleet to set sail. His brother, Diego, was also there, finally headed back to Hispaniola after being reinstated as governor and an absence of more than five years. This was the result of continual lobbying, undertaken in large part by Hernando, particularly during an audience with Charles at Barcelona early in 1519 in which (according to Bartolomé de Las Casas) Hernando had made a forceful case for his brother’s reinstatement and presented an audacious vision for the future of the Americas, one that would expand the Spanish presence through a series of posts for trading and exploration, but avoid the evils of conquest and subjugation. (Las Casas also suggests Hernando—ever his father’s son—also scuppered this plan by asking that the Columbus family be given perpetual control of these posts.) But while a document drawn up by Diego at La Coruña mentions Hernando’s tireless efforts on the family’s behalf, both at the Spanish court and during the long years spent clearing up Diego’s mess in Rome, and announces Diego’s intention to award Hernando a lifetime pension of two hundred thousand maravedís, all this merely serves to cover up the real function of the
agreement: to deprive Hernando of any direct claim to his patrimony, making him not one of Columbus’s heirs but merely a pensioner in his brother’s entourage. In truth, the family estates had never been equal to paying the lavish bequests Columbus had given his beloved younger son, but even the fraction of his inheritance Hernando was granted in the 1511 settlement seems to have gone unpaid, replaced instead by debts and empty promises from Diego on which Hernando could never collect. While some who knew Diego—including Bartolomé de Las Casas and Oviedo—left testimonies of his character suggesting he was simple rather than malicious, he certainly showed little compunction in casting aside the brother who had worked unstintingly for him for much of his life, and whom his father in his dying months had begged him to protect. Hernando probably signed away his legal status as one of his father’s heirs at La Coruña because, as always, he put the interests of the family ahead of his own; but this moment made even starker the division of Columbus’s inheritance, by which the elder son held all of the worldly goods and the younger all of the sublime spirit that had allowed their father to change the shape of the world.19
PART III
An
ATLAS
of the
WORD
* * *
* * *
X
The Devil in the Details
In the thickly detailed diary he kept of the years 1520–21, Albrecht Dürer records a visit he made on 27 August 1520 to the Town Hall in Brussels. There he saw objects newly brought to Europe from the coast of Mexico, where the Emperor Moctezuma had sent them from his inland capital to Hernán Cortés. Two rooms were filled with Aztec armor, weapons, shields, sacred costumes, bed coverings, and assorted instruments, the touchable things of an otherworld. The most striking exhibit was of two disks, each six feet broad: a “sun” made of pure gold and a “moon” of pure silver, of the type thought to have served the Mexica as calendars. Hernando would already have seen these objects in Spain, perhaps when they were first displayed at Valladolid in March earlier that year, when they were accompanied by five Totonac Indians kitted out with gloves against the Spanish winter; this unveiling had drawn breathless descriptions from Peter Martyr, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and the assembled ambassadors of Europe. But the response to them by a maker such as Dürer is particularly touching, as he knew better than most what went into their creation: “I have never in my life seen anything that gave my heart such delight as these things,” he wrote with unusual emotion, “for I saw among them marvelously skillful objects and was amazed at the subtle ingeniousness of people in foreign lands. I cannot find words to describe all those things I found there.” This was Europe’s first introduction to the Aztec culture, and reports would soon afterward reach Spain of Moctezuma’s city-in-a-lake Tenochtitlan, a new island in the European imagination that the conquistadores had nicknamed Venice the Rich. Moctezuma’s capital was duly accorded an entry in Benedetto Bordone’s compendium of island places, the Isolario of 1526.1
Dürer had made the trek from his home in Nuremberg (along with his wife) in hopes of seeing his imperial pension renewed, which had been frozen since the death of Maximilian the previous year; the minutiae of his daily life, recorded in his diary, wonderfully mixes the price of red chalk and roast chicken with near-miraculous encounters—meetings with Erasmus, a viewing of a lost masterpiece by Rogier van der Weyden, and the gift of a ring once owned by the recently deceased Raphael, brought to Dürer by one of the disciples among whom the artist distributed his worldly goods. The venerable and celebrated artist grumbled constantly at the tolls collected at each corner as he crossed the fractured German lands, using his fame to gain free passes where he could, and otherwise using his own prints as currency, exchanging them or selling them as necessary.
Hernando had arrived in the Low Countries six weeks before Dürer, appearing first at Antwerp in mid-June, where he began once again to purchase books on the scale that he had last done at Rome. Fittingly enough, his first acquisition in these northern climes was the editio princeps (first printed edition) of Saxo Grammaticus’s great History of the Danes, in which Hernando might have read the story of the unfortunate Prince Amleth (later more famous as “Hamlet”). It seems likely that on the way to Antwerp Hernando had accompanied the main imperial party during their six-day stop in England, where Charles was eager to preempt Henry’s fledgling dalliance with the French king. In a characteristic display of his chivalric virtue, Henry rode all night to meet Charles when news of the Spanish fleet arrived; writing to Erasmus, Thomas More said it was impossible to describe Henry’s delight on hearing that Charles was coming to England. The two kings later signed at Canterbury an agreement to continue the friendly relations that had long existed between the two royal houses. But the rendezvous could not last long: Henry was due, only days later, to meet Francis outside Calais for a diplomatic pageant that became known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, though he promised Charles to meet with him again soon afterward at Calais. Henry was evidently enjoying his ability to tilt the balance between the two great powers of Europe. The imperial party was not going to allow Henry or the French to have everything their own way, however, and at Antwerp (barely a hundred miles from the Field of the Cloth of Gold) Charles was greeted with a triumphal entry of his own, processing through four hundred arches, forty feet broad and two stories high, topped by performers enacting tributes to the emperor-elect. That these tableaux included “living statues” of naked young women apparently delighted Dürer but greatly embarrassed Charles.2
A map of the great Aztec city Tenochtitlan from Hernando’s copy of the report on the city by Hernán Cortés.
In the time between the festivities surrounding Charles’s arrival and the coronation itself, for which Hernando made his way to Charlemagne’s cathedral at Aachen in October, the Low Countries offered a plethora of marvels for visitors like Hernando. In Antwerp there were the prized bones of a giant, who once collected tolls from travelers on the river Scheldt, and from whose hand—severed by Brabo, nephew of Julius Caesar’s—Antwerp was reputed to have sprung. (Later in the century the Dutch antiquarian Johan van Gorp identified the giant’s bones as the remains of an elephant in his On Giant Slaying—Gigantomachie.) At Brussels, Dürer noted having seen the jawbone of a whale six feet across, and visitors to the city could see The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch at the town house of the Count of Nassau. Hernando added to these swirling impressions by his choice of reading, purchasing on 29 August and at once beginning to read the Magnus elucidarius of Konrad von Mure, a medieval compendium of mythical knowledge that he annotated heavily as he went. In much of the art of the Low Countries, and especially in the paintings of Bosch and the prints of Dürer, Hernando would have found a crowded density completely unlike the spare and dignified classicism under whose spell he had seen the world at Rome (though perhaps reminiscent of the riotous Flamenco-Spanish Gothic of his youth). Unlike the Italian Renaissance, whose response to the messiness of life was to oppose it with the majesty of neoclassical order, the art of the north in the same period embraced chaos as its raw material. It required its viewers to excavate meaning from the thicket of symbolic images with which they were confronted, to read the image as they would a text. It comes as no surprise that Dürer was a devotee of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and he had illustrated a translation of the Hieroglyphica by his friend Willibald Pirckheimer with images not unlike the sacred Aztec disks he saw at Brussels. Hieroglyphs offered a picture language, drawn from nature and perhaps offering a way past the weaknesses of the spoken word. This was not a vision of a world bereft of order—far from it: instead, it showed order as emerging from chaos for those with the right gift, as Christ stares out from amid the crowds of sneering and grotesque faces in the late passion scenes of Bosch and Dürer.3
A sketch of Antwerp harbor by the great artist Albrecht Dürer, made while he and Hernando were staying in that city in 1520.
This tension, between almost excessive copiousness and
a desire to impose order, also characterized the thought of the north. This was nowhere better seen than in the career of the leading light of northern humanism, whom Hernando met that autumn—Desiderius Erasmus, whose early works were of such riotous hilarity that he was widely suspected of being the secret author of Julius Excluded from Heaven, the indictment of that pope’s debauchery that had titillated and scandalized Rome during Hernando’s years there. Though he never admitted to writing the satire, Erasmus did allow that it sounded a lot like his style, especially in his rather edgy early works—the satiric dialogues of Lucian that he translated with Thomas More, and The Praise of Folly, in which Erasmus had trotted forth the foolishness of every group in society to subject it to witheringly ironic praise (Hernando had bought his copy in Rome in November 1515). The worst of Erasmus’s scorn is reserved for the folly of the Roman Curia, whose shortcomings he ruthlessly exposes in terms reminiscent of Julius Excluded from Heaven. Following Erasmus’s lead, the presses of northern Europe poured forth satires of social abuses—mostly directed at the Church and its failings—that combined humanist learning and classical wit with traditional forms of bawdy stories and scurrilous jokes: Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools and tales of the German trickster Till Eulenspiegel, as well as the stories coming out of Thomas More’s household that mocked the ways of greedy and lustful monks. But from the beginning, Erasmus’s delight at this almost riotous excess was balanced by a belief that it must be purged and order restored. In a clever inversion, Erasmus had ended his Praise of Folly by showing he was not (in fact) joking about praising foolishness: it was, in a sense, a good thing to be a fool, but only if you were a Christian fool, who was foolish in the things of this world because you were focused on the hereafter. That, he suggested, was a kind of folly that purged the rest of the foolishness of the world. The same thing went for the celebrated Erasmian literary style, which encouraged copiousness—reveling in classical thought and in imitation of classical style—but only if kept under control by the person using it and turned toward serious ends. Copiousness without order was dangerous. The overwhelming plenitude of the world must be subjected to order, lest it engulf the one who seeks to use it.4
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 20
